K4 Weeks 14 & 15

K is doing very well with school, if only I could say that about listening and getting along with her brother.  She has been really struggling in those two areas lately.   I even considered sending her to preschool so that maybe her listening would improve, but my husband and I decided we were the best people to work on it with her.  I think it is just going to take me being more on top of my game.  I probably let her get away with things just a little too much.  I'm glad she is strong willed and willing to test the world around her, so now I just have to put up better boundaries.   Now on to what she has been doing in school the last two weeks...

Singapore has stalled a little bit for me, and I don't think K is enjoying it as much either.  I really liked it at first, but I'm glad we are going back to Abeka in a couple weeks.  I will continue to supplement with Singapore, but I doubt it will every be our main math curriculum.  K did 9 lessons, and learned about the calendar, seasons, telling time, and counting by tens. 

In all things language arts K is doing very well!  She has no problem with Explode the Code 1.  I rarely need to help her with it, and she likes doing it.  She did 14 pages the last two weeks, and reviewed all of the short vowel sounds.  In All About Spelling 1, we have been on Step 4 for a while now.  Mostly because we keep skipping it.  It's been a busy couple of weeks, and since we are starting this pretty early it is the book that gets pushed to the next day.  Reading is coming along.  We are still working through the BOB books, and then I will have her attempt some level 1 readers.

For read alouds we are using books from Sonlight P3/4 and P4/5.  Every Monday and Tuesday we were reading stories from The Tall Book of Nursery Tales and A First Book of Fairy Tales, and we finished both this last week.  To replace them we are reading from Make Way for McCloskey and Mike Mulligan and More.  On Wednesday and Thursdays we are still reading from Stories from Around the World and the Lion Storyteller, and everyday we read poems from the A Child's Book of Poems and nursery rhymes from Mother Goose. 

K is liking science so much more now that we are learning about animals.  The last two weeks she has been learning about the ocean.  She loves Sea World, so learning about whales, dolphins and sharks has been very interesting to her.  She has a stuffed shamu that she insists must look at her science book with her. 

For geography, we learned about Australia.  We looked at pictures of some of the animals that only live in Australia:  kangaroos, platypus, koalas.  We also learned about the Outback and the Great Barrier Reef.  We looked up Australia in the atlas and found it on our wall map, K colored the flag, and we read the story from Australia in Around the World in 80 Tales.  She also watched Little Einsteins:  Jump for Joey, stamped her passport, and colored in Australia on our black and white map. 

K also did 6 pages in Developing the Early Learner 2.  Overall, it was a productive two weeks!